In 1997, a man from Frankfurt went to the police and reported that his car had been stolen. No one doubted his word. The case was filed as just one among thousands of unsolved thefts in Germany.
Twenty years later, a demolition company came across a rusted Volkswagen Passat inside the garage of an industrial building that was about to collapse. The vehicle was obstructing the work, so they called the police. When the authorities investigated the license plate, they understood what had really happened: no one had stolen it. The owner, now 76 years old, had simply forgotten where he had parked it.
They took him and his daughter to the garage so he could see it with his own eyes. Two decades of rust had done its work: the car no longer started. The man decided not to keep it, and it ended up in the scrapyard, on the very day it finally reappeared.